3 naked ladies talk about their view from the stages and laps of the 70′s, 80′s, 90′s and today.
For as a long as there’s been music, women have danced for the entertainment and titillation of men. Scheherazade. Minsky’s Burlesque. Cage dancing go-go girls in the psychedelic 60′s. Times Square strippers, pole dancers and lap dancers. Women dance….Men watch.
Naked Ladies get around! Look for the 3 Naked Ladies and a new topic every Wednesday on laurishaw.com or thedirtygirldiaries.com
Lauri Shaw: You know, I always used to feel that there was this stereotype, that girls get into the business because we’re uneducated, or that we come from “the wrong side of the tracks.” That kind of thing.
Jodi Sh. Doff: I think that’s the general population’s consensus – that if you’re smart or educated you don’t need to work in the sex business. It’s only for girls with no other options.
LS: Ha! I certainly didn’t grow up in the ‘hood. I grew up in a wealthy, competitive town on Long Island. College was expected, and lots of my classmates were headed to Harvard. Of course, I dropped out early into my undergrad and started stripping almost immediately after that. Is college the norm these days?
Educated Tart: I was working on my masters when I started stripping, but most dancers I’ve worked with don’t have college degrees. They’re immigrants supporting families or girls who didn’t finish high school. There’s often a college girl or two in the mix and nobody is surprised by that. They’re usually either putting themselves through college or out of work/between jobs.
JShD: In the 70′s, women who went to graduate school were few and far between. I was in honors classes up until high school, those girls went to college and beyond. But most of the girls from my high school were happy to get married and start making babies right after graduation. My fancy pants community college degree made me the “smart” girl in the strip clubs.
LS: I mean, I knew some undergrads. Not many. And Tart, you’re a stripper with an MA? Are people surprised? Do they think you should have moved on by now?
ET: It’s usually the customers who try to make me feel like that. “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”
JShD: Paying the bills! That’s what we’re doing, paying the bills.
ET: Exactly!
JShD: Damn though if men don’t always seemed to be looking for girls they can feel superior to — I couldn’t play that game. I always felt that my formal education and rather large vocabulary were liabilities.
LS: This is really interesting to me, because like I said, I didn’t finish my formal education. Does having a degree put up any kind of social barrier between you and the girls at work who don’t have one?
ET: Not at all. Fellow dancers understand how convenient stripping can be compared to other jobs, even if you’ve got lots of education and options.
JShD: Agreed, the girls themselves never held it against me. Just the opposite, it was like they felt I had a way out if I wanted it, that they didn’t. Most of the girls I worked with came from homes where education was not only not a priority, it made you an “other”, an outsider. They were blue collar all the way. Their parents had jobs, not careers. No one was putting money away for school, there was no mention of school loans. And in ten years, I never saw a single book (not even a novel) in anyone’s dance bag or purse.
LS: I knew very few strippers who’d actually finished a degree.
ET: I think it’s easier to justify stripping while you’re working on your degree than years after you’ve finished one. Most of the college girls I’ve known have felt pressure to move on and get a “real” job after they graduated.
JShD: Hells, yeah. Why bother with grad school at all if you’re going to stay in the Naked for Money business? Grad school is hard work, its not like some Learning Annex Adult Ed course where you breeze through. I think I’d want to cash in, to justify my degree and all the hard work. I’m amazed at all these grad school girls today who are strippers, escorts and pro doms.
ET: When I started grad school I wasn’t planning on being a stripper for the next seven years. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Overseas grad school is a LOT cheaper than it is here, so it didn’t seem like such a huge deal. It was only once I started working on my art projects that I realized I wouldn’t be able to make it happen unless I kept stripping. I’m not some super-human who can work a 9-5 then come home and do something creative on the side — I need to sleep!
JshD: So for you, for most of the grad school girls, stripping is a means to an end – to support your art, put you through college, etc. In the 70s and 80s you didn’t see that. Well, you did, but the end was different. It wasn’t education — it was money and drugs.
ET: College girls tend to work in the upscale bars, and there’s definitely a class system — college girls who can present themselves as smart and sophisticated can make money by just talking to customers for hours without even letting them touch them, while immigrants who speak less English or girls who can’t present themselves as “classy” can’t pull that off so easily.
LS: That bit only works because customers seem to expect that none of the girls are smart or educated. When they find a girl who’s either, she’s like a trained seal, or a chimp that knows sign language.
This entry was written by , posted on October 29, 2009 at 4:55 pm, filed under three naked ladies and tagged strippers. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Some things I don’t remember at all. My first kiss. My first date. I don’t remember a lot of my life. Not the way you remember yours.
I remember photographs of events, but not the actual event.
Sometimes I think that I made the whole thing up.
All of it.
Then, tentwentythirty years later I run into someone who was there, in that snapshot moment and they say, Yes, that’s what happened. Yes, it was exactly like that. Or they don’t say anything because maybe they blinked too sometimes. Or they look at me like I’m crazy because they remember it a whole ‘nother way completely.
There are things I know, the way I know about Columbus or the Kennedy assassination, but I don’t technically remember, because, like I said, I wasn’t actually there.
That’s how my life is. I’d blink and days would disappear. Even when I knew where I was, I wasn’t really there. I left my baggage in the lobby, but I was gone, baby, gone. Checked out. I know the stories, but they happened to that other Jodi while I watched from the back side of the looking glass. I shouldn’t be held responsible, because I wasn’t actually there.
I don’t remember not one single thing from my own eyes. I remember from the eyes of the other me, the one who stepped out, stood in the shadows, sat next to me in the cabs, lounged on the couch in the corner and watched with no reaction at all. To anything. No matter what was going down. From the safety of the shadows I watched my life just happen– the good, the bad and the ugly. Even in a room by myself, I stood in a corner, watching to see what I would do next….
Word is you remember the things that are important to you. I think I remember the things that changed me, even if they didn’t seem important at the time.
I remember taking my first hit of cocaine (Hotel Earle, 1976),
snorting my first bag of dope (Mardi Gras bathroom, 1981)
and turning my first trick (Floyd Simpson, February 1978).
This entry was written by , posted on at 9:00 am, filed under the diary and tagged blink, drugs, the abyss. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
I never actually thought of myself as a prostitute. I knew girls who were, lots of them. They had sex in exchange for a prearranged mutually agreed upon amount of money.
the pickpocket ©2001 courtesy schmitt-hall studios
I, on the other hand, at various times took spontaneously offered cab fare from men I was having sex with. Granted, the cab fare in question was usually in the neighborhood of $300 to get from 47th Street to 7th Street, but still, we called it cab fare. The money came from the men of power and influence who made the rules in my little world: wise guys, bar owners, drug dealers. Ironically, while I wouldn’t have fucked any of them for fun, I would’ve fucked them all for free.
But I didn’t.
I fucked them each for somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred 1980 dollars, which is around a thousand of today’s dollars. Not a bad neighborhood no matter what I called myself.
I thought about making the official leap of faith and applied to a few outcall whore houses. If you’ve never done it, you can’t appreciate the irony involved in being interviewed for the job of “whore”. Each time, it started with call to an escort service listed in the back of the Village Voice. Followed by instructions to call again, this time from a particular pay phone within eyeball range of that particular House of the Rising Sun. From the pay phone, after passing the eyeball from the window test, I’d be given a specific address.
One shop liked me, but I didn’t like them. The “house” was depressing. A rundown apartment, stuffed with worn out furniture & threadbare girls sitting around waiting for a phone to ring. Not exactly what I had pictured after reading the Happy Hooker. But then, I wasn’t exactly Xaviera Hollander…
That point was driven home at Cachet, the creme de la creme, when Sidney Biddle Barrows declared me an exotic. I’m sure she meant to say ethnic, as in “Dear, you’ve got Jew-girl written all over that punim and we don’t like your kind around here”. She just had too much crust on her upper to actually say something like that out loud.
I did go on dates with strangers in exchange for prearranged mutually agreed upon amounts of money. I wouldn’t've had so much as a cup of coffee with a single one of them if they weren’t paying for my time. But while there was the implication of sex, the expectation of sex, sometimes even the anticipation and aroma of sex, there wasn’t ever any actual sex.
They always had a good time.
Even when I would rob them.
Most of the time they wouldn’t know they’d been robbed until later.
If I’d thought about it at the time, I’d have considered myself a thief
rather than a whore.
But,
I never thought about it
at all.
Not even
once.
This entry was written by , posted on October 26, 2009 at 9:20 am, filed under the diary and tagged johns, whores. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
There was no one else I’d even thought to call. Boyfriends & girlfriends came and went, but we always had each other. Michael was the original BFF, my go-to guy since that first hit of acid we dropped together.
I was safe with him around. No matter how much I drank, he’d never leave without me. He was the one who took me to the Raven’s Nest, my first topless bar. If my mother knew, maybe she’d have cut my father some slack in the “whose fault is it she turned out to be such a fuck up” department. Michael shot pool while I dropped shot glasses full of bourbon into mugs of beer, downing them in one gulp. I hate bourbon, but the long-haul truckers who packed the Nest every night thought it was cute. By fifteen, as long as you were buying, I was drinking.
He was with me at the Bon Soir too, charming underage Puerto Rican girls while I was getting ready to turn my first trick. He knew everything there was to know about me. If anyone could understand how I wound up broken, bloody and covered in flea bites on the floor of a garage in the Lower East side, it was Michael.
I wrap my arms around him and cramps shoot painfully through my lower body. It’s the beginning of a miscarriage, but I don’t know that, not yet. For now, I hold on to Michael’s waist as the spasms roll through me and he kicks the Harley to life. “Drive slow,” I whisper, “please, just take it slow.”
I spend a few days with my parents, recuperating from the last seven.
Communications are on a need to know basis and I don’t think they need to know much. They know I’m away from Red Wolf – I let him take the blame for all my bruises. They don’t know about the topless bars, the pimps or Havasha. No ones day would be made better by sharing that information.
They take the cat back to live with them. Apparently, I’m not responsible enough to care for another living thing. Truth is, I’m barely able to care for myself. My body agrees and a bloody worm is flushed down the toilet—the last traces of my storybook marriage, Red Wolf’s almost baby.
I’m tired. So fucking tired.
My father used to say “If you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, get a job in a restaurant,” which is pretty practical and it worked for a while. Lola gets me a gig with her at Mimi’s, an Italian restaurant with a piano bar, which keeps my belly full of lasagna. Lola keeps my tea cup full of Harvey’s Bristol Crème. I keep a used tea bag on the saucer & pretend no one can smell the sweet sherry on me. I sip at it non-stop and she refills it over & over.
But my bruises and flea bites heal. I forget that week and now what I remember is “If you don’t know where your next drink is coming from, get a job in a bar.”
Blink.
And just like that, I’m back to where nobody expects me to behave any better than I can. Where I don’t have hide my drinking in a tea-cup. I go back to where I belong. Home. Times Square.
And I still haven’t told you about my first trick, even though I meant to, that’s where this all was going. It’s just such a long story. And he was so very fat. So very, very fat.
This entry was written by , posted on October 22, 2009 at 7:01 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, blink, Bon Soir, drinking, drugs, family, Levittown, partners in crime. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
For as a long as there’s been music, women have danced for the entertainment and titillation of men. Scheherazade. Minsky’s Burlesque. Cage dancing go-go girls in the psychedelic 60′s. Times Square strippers, pole dancers and lap dancers. Women dance….Men watch.
Naked Ladies get around! Look for the 3 Naked Ladies and a new topic every Wednesday on laurishaw.com, $pread magazine online or thedirtygirldiaries.com
This week on Three Naked Ladies, Essence Alexander sits in for Rachel Aimee.
Jodi Sh. Doff: Lauri, I loved your piece in Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys about coming out to your mom — but what was it really like?
Lauri Shaw: In Mother-Daughter Day, a stripper tries to win her mother’s love and approval by taking her out for the afternoon. Mom bulldozes over countless boundaries, makes a colossal pest of herself, and finally demands to know point blank what her daughter does for a living. When she gets the answer she never really wanted in the first place, she goes completely ballistic, and any warmth that was left between the two women unravels in full.
The story isn’t quite verbatim, but it’s close. After that day, my mother did her best to pretend the whole thing never happened. When I tried to bring it up, she changed the subject. If I persisted, she said, “I don’t want to hear about it.”
My father was a different story. He didn’t speak to me at all for several years. Which was a neat trick, since my parents are still married and living together. My father’s a complicated man–extremely religious and very controlling. He was also an officer in the military, a reservist, but I spent some time on Navy bases as a child.
I never had a good relationship with either of them. Stripping was probably beside the point. As a child, I got my ass beat for eating non-kosher food. So anything at ALL having to do with sex? Are you fucking kidding me? I was out of that house by the time I was 15.
JshD: Just the opposite, my dad had worked in the burlesque houses and the carnival side shows, so I somehow thought down ‘n dirty was my birthright.
LS: What sort of things did your dad say about strip clubs?
JshD: He’d always glamorized burlesque, Bettie Page, and even the underworld. My mother blamed all my wrong moves on his stories and truthfully, they were a bit of an inspiration. They knew I tended bar in a skimpy leotard, but not about the stripping until after I’d quit. Even so, they hated me working the clubs. They couldn’t separate my drug abuse and the strip clubs. But then, neither could I.
I’d wanted them to see that it wasn’t so bad, that the flames of hell weren’t licking up from the floor, so I forced them to come have a drink at the Mardi Gras where I worked. My mom had been a “good girl,” she’d never even sat at a bar before and here she was, music blasting, creepy men hunched over their drinks and naked women everywhere. I was all la-ti-da about it, but it was pretty traumatic for them. They saw seedy people & scary things. But, in the 80s, that’s exactly what it was: seedy & scary. It confirmed all their fears.
LS: Sounds like it was traumatic for them because they loved you.
JshD: My mom kept a Rolodex card listing my height, eye color, scars & tattoos — so she could claim the body when I was found dead in the streets. Seriously. She also worried about appearance. She didn’t want anyone to say anything bad about me. At 79, she still worries about that with my writing, god bless ‘er.
Essence Alexander: Writing was the catalyst for me telling my mother that I stripped. I had been writing my show about stripping. My mother knew I was working on a play, but I was cryptic about the particulars whenever she’d ask about it. When I was finally ready to workshop the piece, I told her the dates, not thinking anything of it. Then she told me she planned to come to the reading. YIKES! I knew I had to tell her now, but how?! My mother is the queen of good appearances from the conservative British West Indies. As a child, she went to church six days a week. This is a woman who didn’t allow me to have boyfriends until I was in college and she had no way of stopping me anymore. I gave the script to my “cool” aunty, her sister, to read first. “Uh, this is kinda my true story and I’m going to tell Mum.” Her first reaction was a concerned, “Does she have to know?”
JshD: I’ve totally used my writing as a way to let my mom know things. After spoiler alerts and disclaimers, she reads. Then if she’s up to knowing more, we talk.
EA: Yes, I wanted her to hear it from me and have time to digest the info before seeing the adventures of her first born in America as a stripper on stage. My aunt called me the next morning and said, “It’s your life to live and she’ll be OK or not. I love the script by the way!”
So I called my mother and said, “Soooo, while I was writing my show, I worked as a stripper off and on. But I don’t do it now.” My mother replied, “Well, why aren’t you still dancing now? Your legs broke?!”
LS: Ha! Your mom’s got serious character.
JshD: Amazing. Obviously, you expected worst…
EA: I wonder if my aunty padded my fall. I told my sister and she burst into tears because she had the movie Player’s Club as her only frame of reference. She came to work with me one night: watched, ordered Chinese food, got bored and went home. I’ve never told my father and I’m not sure my mother did either. I think parents can be OK with other people doing something but NOT their child. I would have taken it to the grave and not told my mother were it not for the show.
This entry was written by , posted on October 21, 2009 at 9:00 am, filed under three naked ladies and tagged family, strippers. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
The morning sun blinded me as we rode into it –
and then I blinked.
When I open my eyes again I’m staring at greasy tin ceilings and the smell of oil and gasoline weigh me down. I lay on a thin foam mattress surrounded by cogs & gears. Greasy metal things litter the cement floor around me. It’s the itching that wakes me. My arms, my legs, my thighs, my crotch. I scratch till I bleed. I scratch some more.
Through grimy windows and thick exhaust I make out the corner of Second Avenue & Houston Street in the failing sunlight. The back end of the motorcycle blocks the open front door.
That would make this Havasha’s motorcycle shop.
My body howls as I turn to look for him. Shoved in a corner atop a pile of dirty yellow cushions, he scratches in his sleep. Curled into a dark leather ball of grease, sweat, and hair, so close I can touch him if I reach out. I don’t.
Pulling myself up, despite my body’s loud objections, I take a step towards the open front door. My muscles scream as I fall. Or maybe it’s me that screamed this time. Havasha continues to sleep, one foot trembling like a dog when he dreams.
The heel on my right boot is completely gone. My foot is caked with dried blood, which I assume is mine. Even if I couldn’t feel my toes wiggling, which I can, I can see my toes wiggling through the holes of what’s left of my cowboy boot. The rust corduroys Doug’d bought didn’t even last the week. The right leg is torn and stained. Dirt, grease, pebbles, torn skin, urine, dark clotted blood. Same for my right arm, only not so badly. Scrapes and bruises that cover my back. I’d see them too, if I could turn my head. My left side seems intact, just dirty and itchy. I poke and prod, checking for serious damage, breaks or fractures.
Nothing.
Bites, bruises, blood, yes, but nothing broken. My lucky day.
I ache. All over.
Havasha rolls, scratching, a small pool of spittle glistens in the coarse dark hairs of his beard. He mumbles in his sleep. Outside, cars speed by, honking & yelling. Suits rushing home. Everyone everywhere has somewhere to hurry from and someone to hurry to. I pull myself up again, bracing on the wall and the desk for support. What happened? I wonder, How did I come to look and smell this bad, feel this bad, hurt this much?
Shit. This is what happens when I blink.
Slowly, I remember. Red Wolf. The police. The roaches. Shit, the roaches. I have nowhere to hurry to. I don’t really even have somewhere to casually saunter to.
Names & numbers of no one I know are written on the wall above a desk piled with more dark and oily mechanical things. An old black rotary phone hides under dirty napkins and empty Chinese food containers. I hold the receiver to my ear and dial slowly, afraid I’ll wake the sleeping troll.
“Michael,” my voice hoarse, “I want to come home. I didn’t know who else to call.”
I watch Havasha struggle and scratch while I whisper directions to my oldest friend over the phone. Michael got me my first hit of acid in high school, but what will he think when he sees me like this?
“Bring roach spray. Lots of it.” I place the receiver gently back in its cradle and slip out the door, leaving Havasha to fight his own demons there on the yellow cushions.
I leave a gouge in the wall where my name and number were.
Sitting on the curb not even a bum stops to ask me for change or a cigarette.
I’m still there, smoking my last few cigarettes
when Michael pulls up on his Harley.
I can tell how much of a mess I am
by the look on his face.
I point to Havasha’s bike.
It’s all I can manage and it’s enough for now.
Mangled gears.
Bright metal torn
and twisted.
Leather seats sprinkled with dried blood
and dirt.
Handlebars contorted
and compressed.
Just a big shiny scrap metal sculpture now.
I wrap my arms around Michael’s waist as he kicks the Harley to life. “Drive slow,” I whisper into the curls around his ear, “please, just drive slow.”
This entry was written by , posted on October 15, 2009 at 11:14 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, blink, dirty boys, East Village, roaches. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
For as a long as there’s been music, women have danced for the entertainment and titillation of men. Scheherazade. Minsky’s Burlesque. Cage dancing go-go girls in the psychedelic 60′s. Times Square strippers, pole dancers and lap dancers. Women dance….Men watch.
Naked Ladies get around! Look for the 3 Naked Ladies and a new topic every Wednesday on laurishaw.com, $pread magazine online or thedirtygirldiaries.com
Lauri Shaw: At Dangerous Curves, the manager would fine us if we started groping each other onstage, even if there was a packed house cheering us on! I never understood why it bothered him so much.
Rachel Aimee: Managers always seem to be weirdly uncomfortable with girl on girl shows. They claim it’s because they’re worried about getting shut down but I think sometimes they’re just jealous because they think the girls are having too much fun. They can be weird about female customers getting lapdances too—a bouncer once refused to let some guy watch me give his girlfriend a lapdance. He made him sit at the bar until we were finished!
Jodi Sh. Doff: There wasn’t a lot of girl on girl action on stage in the clubs when I worked, but there was always an undercurrent. You can’t help it with that many naked and half dressed women in one place. There’d be little intimations but no actual touching. The State Liquor Authority had very specific ideas about obscenity and girl on girl would’ve put us in the category of the live sex shows and risked the liquor license.
RA: Do you think it’s more common for women to go to strip clubs as customers now that the industry is less taboo?
JShD: Well, single women weren’t allowed in my day–they were assumed to be prostitutes cruising for johns–and couples were discouraged.
LS: Yeah, women had to be escorted by a man. Managers worried that a woman on her own was someone’s angry wife or jealous girlfriend.
RA: Some bouncers are still weird about letting single women in. The women who do get in are usually straight–either business women with male colleagues or girlfriends/wives with their partners–and I hate to say it but most of them are really annoying. They don’t tip, talk deliberately loudly about how the dancers are ugly or fat, take their clothes off and dance all over their boyfriends like they’re trying to compete with us (as if we care!), then get up on stage and dance around like they think they’re really cool. The customers are usually more excited to see a civilian getting naked than a pro so they end up with all our tip money too.
LS: Thankfully I never remember women coming in and doing any of that, but I did see other strange behavior. I’ll never forget this customer at Runway 69. She was a schoolteacher, the spitting image of January Jones. She swore she was straight, and was pretty defensive about the whole thing. Then she started drinking the fake beer.
She thought she was getting drunk. She asked for a lapdance while her husband watched. When I danced on her, she started breathing all heavy and begging me to touch her everywhere. The dance room at Runway was only semi-private. The bouncers were watching. I started getting really nervous that this woman would get me fired.
After the dance, she followed me into the ladies room. She blockaded the door and begged me to get her off! “Please, I’ll pay you, I’ve never done it with a woman,” etc., until her husband pounded on the door and yelled at her that they were going home.
JShD: Girl on girl was pretty unusual even in the dumps. Guys weren’t inclined to pay the cost of buying bottles for two dancers to get them both into the back rooms. It wasn’t my thing, but occasionally I’d work with a girl named Carrie, we looked like sisters. We rocked that “sisters are doing it for themselves” scene one night with a high roller who was pretty drunk by the time we got him.
LS: This girl I knew had been fired from the Blue Angel for making out with a female customer. She claimed the customer was Drew Barrymore! And that it was worth it. My own celebrity experience was almost as cool. Jenna Jameson featured at the Zebra Club in Connecticut. She dived into the crowd and sucked on my tits in front of 400 people.
RA: No way, really?!
JshD: Real girl on girl action was a different story. At the Mardi Gras, Cheryl the bartender was a total butch dyke and her girl, Roxy, danced there. I don’t think you see that anymore, stone dykes working straight strip clubs.
RA: Lots of lesbians work in strip clubs these days. They’re usually femmes, but not always. I worked with a girl whose butch girlfriend would hang out at the club every night, drinking with the customers and encouraging them to tip her girlfriend. Or sometimes she would just pocket their money while her girlfriend distracted them from the stage. They made a pretty good team.
LS: I met plenty of dancers who fucked girls, but fewer that identified as lesbians. Or they’d say they were lesbians, but then they’d go home to their man. I never saw a single girl, either stripping or behind the bar, that I would describe as “butch.”
JshD: Like I’ve said, there was a lot more latitude back then. At the Butterfly, Billie and Loretta were young, gorgeous, and totally hot for each other. I remember walking out of the upstairs lounge one night. They were buck naked on the floor, locked mouth to cooch and cooch to mouth. I liked to bust my neck tripping over them but they paid us no mind. They weren’t thinking about anything but getting off. So everyone got a free show. A pretty hot one.
This entry was written by , posted on October 14, 2009 at 9:00 am, filed under three naked ladies and tagged strippers. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
artwork courtesty of A. Andrew Gonzalez
Movement at my left distracts me.
Havasha.
I’d forgotten about him. He removes his wet clothes, hangs the heavy leather jacket from a nail in the wall. His worn leather boots, caked with mud, stand alone in a corner. A torn thermal shirt hangs from another nail. He looks up, watching me watch him and I hear “To dry”, in my head, but no one’s spoken. We’ve gone beyond the need for speech.
I peel layer after wet layer of my own clothes, hanging them on nails, off shelves; laying them out in open areas on the dusty cement floor, until finally, we’re both naked.
Where is everyone else, I wonder at him. We’ve been waiting for hours.
Or minutes, he thinks back, I don’t know.
Minute or hours? I can’t tell.
Trapped in each others’ eyes, we ease down onto the blanket, floating now on the sky, now on the sea. Cross legged. Face to face, touching only knees & fingertips, heart & soul, past & future. The last two hits of mescaline melt on our tongues, sliding purple rivers down our throats, filling lungs with purple breath. The candles glitter like chandeliers through a violet haze that engulfs the three of us.
The tiny orange cat binds us further, soft apricot trails following her as she figure eights around, behind, between us. She settles in my lap, nuzzles into my pubic hair, cuddling safely into my nest of calves and thighs, my fortress of warm pink flesh. My chi, my soul, my brain, my heart, my fucking essence flows into Havasha, his into me, ours into her, this scrawny red cat. Giving her strength, giving her life, in exchange for the sanctuary she offered from rain and night.
Always I find myself looking for sanctuary and safety.
She closes her eyes and sleeps.
We leave our bodies there to keep her and then travel on to another level.
Physical boundaries dissolve.
Time and place liquefy.
We flow, caught in the eddies and whirlpools,
spinning & dancing into oblivion.
Into darkness.
Into light.
Music fills me, buoys me higher, then escapes through my pours. It carries me away and drops me, tumbling through soft smoky white skies. I breathe and a thousand little bells chime. My heart.drum.beat. keeps the rhythm. I float and tumble, finding another heartdrumbeat–Havasha. Our drums beat together, our bells ring in harmony and we spin into a silky bright whiteness, cascade down a waterfall of lavender, splash into the brilliant emerald, the pulsing lapis of the blanket where we started.
The kitten hasn’t moved, she sleeps in my lap.
Our clothes are dry. My skin is slick with sweat. The air thick with the stink of sweat, candlewax, blood & urine. A few candles sputter, barely alive at their final inch.
My eyes burn, my muscles ache, my mind searches for a soft dark place to sleep.
My hair hurts.
I wonder if Havasha is as tired and sore as I am. I ask, without speaking, but this time I get nothing back. Our moment has passed. We haven’t spoken a word aloud since the accident that we’ve both forgotten by now.
I wonder, again, what happened to everyone else.
The sun is up, again, as we mount the bike. I close my eyes and we ride into the blinding white.
This entry was written by , posted on October 12, 2009 at 9:52 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, blink, dirty boys, drugs, East Village. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
photo courtesy of Olafur Kr. Olafsson
It’s dark and quiet under the truck, out of the way of the pounding rains, restful. My fingers make designs in the drops of blood, playing on the smooth irregularities of the peach cobblestones. Tiny rivers form, swirl, then flood and carry away the dirt, washing away the little red droplets.
“You O.K.?”
The voice is very far away, inside the rain, inside the dark here under the truck, on the other side of the flood. I turn my head and see Havasha squatting beside me, silver dripping off the dark terrain of his face, filling my little rivers, cooling my skin. Wide muscular paws hook the crevices under my arms, pulling me out of the under truck dark and into the darker wet night. He leans me up against the panel truck that so rudely interrupted our flight and rummages around, grunting and growling he pulls, tugs and struggles to free the bike, stuck under the truck as well. Together, we manage to pull her free, pull her upright and mount her again. She coughs, sputters and then hums off, carrying us into the sparkling dampness.
There’s a new club opening tonight with live music and an open bar…somewhere on Bleecker Street. It’s part of the cure, he says. The good time part. No time to check for damages from the fall, there’s an open bar, a good time, live music.
All doors are grey in the dark. Big heavy doors with red painted numbers that fad and change with time, rain, life and mescaline.
The mescaline is in full bloom again. Did we take more just before the fall? Glittering sapphire breezes softly around us as we search for the right door, listen for music, look for crowds spilling into the street. Huge rats sporting their dressiest furs scamper across our feet and each other, rushing to a party of their own, chattering wildly with the excitement of it all. You’re too early, screaming, squeaky cartoon voices thrown over their shoulders as they scuttle down the block. Open the door. That one, there. Wait inside. Hurry, get off the street, hurry, hurry, hurry…they squeal and fade away, barely audible now as they find the door to their own party and stumble over each other, each trying to be the first one inside.
The night thickens imperceptibly, our movements slow in the viscous evening air. And the door looms in front of us, leans over us, eclipses everything. Havasha pops the old brass lock & handle and the rusted hinges and rotting wood just give way.
No one is here. We’re the first. We decide to wait inside.
Inside, a bony red cat waits patiently, the rats must’ve told her we were coming. The heavy door slams shut behind me, I take Havasha’s rough hand and we follow the cat. She turns, her sparkling yellow eyes meet mine and she leads us past unfinished walls, bags of nails, boxes of tools, discarded paper coffee cups and small piles of cigarette butts. Past a large green plastic can full of garbage – half eaten sandwiches, scraps of wood, crumpled papers and old copies of the Post & the News. She turns & catches my eye again before she rounds the corner and disappears through a narrow doorway.
Someone lights a match - was that me? Havasha? I don’t know. Two liquid gold eyes sparkle in the flame, and we move closer to them. She sits on a shelf, her tiny frame flanked by two thick white candles on one side and a gray cardboard box of plumber’s candles on the other. The first candle gets lit, then another and another and another until the box is empty and the room is bright & warm.
I look around for the raggedy cat. She’s curled into a tight red fur ball in the center of a coarse blanket of blue and green, apparently unimpressed as the colors ebb & flow around her, over her. The blanket covers a thick mattress on the cement floor.
The mattress begins to sag in the center–
–as the tiny cat grows heavier & denser.
This entry was written by , posted on October 8, 2009 at 3:00 pm, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, dirty boys, drinking, drugs, East Village. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
For as a long as there’s been music, women have danced for the entertainment and titillation of men. Scheherazade. Minsky’s Burlesque. Cage dancing go-go girls in the psychedelic 60′s. Times Square strippers, pole dancers and lap dancers. Women dance….Men watch.
Naked Ladies get around! Look for the 3 Naked Ladies and a new topic every Wednesday on laurishaw.com, $pread magazine online or thedirtygirldiaries.com
Lauri Shaw: I was a 19-year-old barmaid in Yonkers, NY at this crappy dive topless place, City Lights…
Jodi Sh. Doff: Legal drinking age was 21 in NY by then, so you were flying under the radar…
LS: I fell in with one of the dancers, who dragged me along to her shift at Runway 69 in Times Square. I couldn’t believe it — nobody danced, they all just crouched in front of the men, showed cooch, and got paid. The girls got a kick out of me. I was trying to be streetwise, like I saw this shit every day.
JshD: My first cooch sighting freaked me out. I was a cocktail waitress in a joint called Winks. I’m not sure I even finished my first shift!
LS: I wasn’t fooling anyone either, but they decided to dress me up and turn me out. My friend thought it was a riot. Before I knew it, I was wearing someone else’s dress, and shoes two sizes too big. They pushed me right out on that stage. I was terrified, but I was determined to follow through, because I was being dared.
It was truly horrific. I didn’t know how to dance. Three customers walked away the minute they saw me. I didn’t dare let go of the pole, I knew I’d wipe out. I was up there for three songs and the only tip I got was from a guy who said, “I’m only giving you this dollar ’cause I feel sorry for you.” If there was ever a moment in my life I wanted to die of shame, that was it.
Rachel Aimee: I wasn’t even thinking about money when I auditioned. One guy held out a 5 pound note but I was too scared to get close enough to take it.
LS: When I came off stage, the manager was laughing his ass off in the corner. He told me I was hired. Later I found out they didn’t even have auditions at Runway. I’d been an elaborate practical joke for the whole staff. In the end, though, I had the last laugh–I stayed for the rest of the shift and made $300 in just a few hours.
RA: I started when I was 23 and living in London back in 2003. I was so naïve I took a stripping class before I auditioned–I thought I actually had to be able to dance! What a waste of money—we learned all these old burlesque moves…
LS: Oh, that stuff is so hot now, the revival of old school burlesque. Jo Boobs, The World Famous Bob, The Pontani Sisters…
RA: …but completely irrelevant once I saw how real strippers danced. I started at a little club called Boulevard in Soho. It was one of the few clubs that was stage dancing only. I thought tabledancing meant dancing on a table, which I was sure I couldn’t do in heels, and I was afraid of lapdancing because of the contact—as I said, I was very naïve back then.
LS: What made you even think of stripping, then?
RA: I was a total cliche–a gender studies major interested in the feminist debates about whether stripping was empowering or degrading and figured I’d see for myself! (Of course, I soon realized it was just a damn convenient way to pay the rent.) I had an elaborate audition outfit which included a skirt, button down shirt, stockings, and even a cardigan…
JshD: A cardigan? That’s classic!
RA: The dancers just laughed at me. I had no idea most girls went out there in a bikini or minidress. They tried to get me to at least lose the cardigan but I almost started crying, saying I had to wear the outfit I’d practiced in or I’d forget my routine! After that they left me alone, but they teased me about it for months after I got hired.
JshD: I was still living at home when I got fired from my job as a file clerk. The ad in the back of the Village Voice said, “barmaid, no experience necessary”. I had no experience, so I was eminently qualified.
RA: It’s funny how many strippers start as bartenders, or at least intended to…
JshD: Bartending really was a “gateway drug” for me. The Mardi Gras was the largest topless bar in the city, with three stages, a dozen cash registers and Jake La Motta as a bouncer. Total big time. Me & my no experience made more in one day than I had in a week at the office.
It didn’t take long before I auditioned as a dancer. I was already the girl who ripped her clothes off in public when she drank. I realized recently that I wasn’t a stripper who drank, I was a drunk who stripped. What I wasn’t, was a girl who ever felt pretty. The glamor of the bars and their willingness to pay for what I was already doing for free held a lot of allure. I borrowed a nasty g-string, just a scratchy swatch of fabric and a pair of borrowed heels as well, and suddenly I was the center of the world, lights flashed, everything switched from black & white to Technicolor and I was beautiful.
RA: It’s amazing how being on stage for the first time makes you feel like that, even if you’ve never had any kind of aspirations to be a performer.
JshD: It was great…until the manager yelled “Let’s see some floor work! Pretend you’re on top.” I was 17! I’d never been on top. So there I was, a chubby teenager doing naked push ups in front of strangers.
RA: Floor work killed me when I first started–my knees were so bruised and scratched up I couldn’t kneel or bend my knees for at least a month.
JshD: That manager never asked me to dance again, but I was sold. Those few minutes sealed the deal for me.
This entry was written by , posted on October 7, 2009 at 9:00 am, filed under three naked ladies and tagged strippers, Times Square. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
I really have no idea how I wound up on that motorcycle.
I was hiding under blankets on Lola’s couch, while she petted my head and murmured something that sounded vaguely like “nice kitty”. Things had veered off in a direction I didn’t know what to do with and Lola’s Chelsea couch was a safe distance from the East Village and miles away from Times Square. I sipped chamomile tea, mumbled quiet nonsense to myself and tried to find my way back.
And then, Havasha appeared. He’d been a brief bit of harmless crazy before I even moved into the East Village. He was a little…special. Every morning, he drank his own pee, something to do with his martial arts training and while I’ll drink just about anything no matter how foul if it gets me fucked up, I draw the line at pee. Even my own.
I took a sip of tea, looked up and he was there. Crouching on muscular haunches in front of me, his short thick body leaned on Chester the Dog for support. Chester & Havasha, tilting their furry heads this way and then that way, the two of them sniffing the air around me, they could have been brothers. Squatting there, jeans streaked with grease and street dirt, his chestnut hair matted into clumps, square yellowed teeth, big, like lemon flavored Chiclets you’d found at the bottom of your purse, giant horse teeth in a smile just this side of madness, he looked a little bit…troll-like, like maybe he knew the secrets of the universe
She needs a drink, he said.
Apparently he did know the secrets of the universe, or at least the secrets of mine.
I hadn’t had a drink since the Porkpie…only two days ago? I’d lost control of the days and nights and had to keep reminding myself what followed what. Too much of the big and scary. I was afraid even a deep breath would cause the walls to collapse, everything would come crashing down, crushing me, breaking windows and bones, cockroaches would fill my mouth
She needs a drink, he said. And a good time.
I was the couch, waiting for the return of my sanity.
And then I wasn’t.
How he found me there I have no idea. One minute I was on the couch in borrowed pajamas –I blinked–and I was on the back of his motorcycle, a behemoth 1100 with crash bars front and back. I traded toast and blackberry jam for mescaline, chamomile tea for vodka. Vodka & Kahlua. Vodka & Kahlua with Milk. Kahlua, Amaretto & Milk. And finally, when the bars ran out of milk, Kahlua, Amaretto and Vodka.
Havasha stuffed handfuls of quarters into jukeboxes in the back of each bar we stopped at, making sure I had everything I needed. Music loud enough to drown out the noise outside. Mescaline to drown out the noise inside. A motorcycle that could get me anywhere but here, and fast. Vodka, because a day without vodka is a day without sunshine. Cigarettes, because you can’t live on Vodka alone.
Life was beginning to feel normal again.
Minutes grew into hours and the white hot mescaline morning slid us into yet another bar. Another drink. Hours turn into seconds. Another hit of mescaline.
Time stops.
We watch, crouched in a dark bar at the end of a deep hallucinogenic tunnel, a million miles away, the air damp and cool as silver glitter floats slowly from a pussywillow grey sky, each silver piece shattering into a thousand deafening shards as it hits the quiet cement sidewalk outside.
Time for one more drink before it really starts raining, I think as my mind scrambles out of the tunnel, scratching and clawing, only to slip back down inside. One more drink before we need to get the bike off the streets. There’s always time for one more drink.
Sharp, cold silver needles shower down on me, pierce my skin, cry down my face. The chrome monster between our legs roars to life and I hold tight at Havasha’s thick leather waist, burying myself in the matted fur at the back of his neck. We scream into the storm, racing down Second Avenue, rushing away from the wet, afraid of melting. The asphalt, slick with oil and water, shrinks back, exposing bits of Old New York and its cobblestone streets. I scream at the night, howl along with the roaring engine, sharp needles pierce my tongue and fill my throat.
I scream at the panel truck.
Parked directly in the path of our mescaline blind ride.
The truck appears not to notice me
and the motorcycle
seems to have no intention
of Evil Kneiveling anything at all this evening.
This entry was written by , posted on October 5, 2009 at 2:18 pm, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, blink, dirty boys, drinking, drugs, East Village. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
The inside of a cab is a relatively small space for all this screaming, most of which is coming from me.
I drag this dance bag around with me everywhere I go, stuffed with anything I could possibly need in case I can’t go home for a day or two, which considering the week I’m having, is a smart move. Now, in addition to all the crap already in the bag, I’ve brought dozens and dozens of shiny black and brown roaches with me. Roaches waddle over my change purse, ski down my house keys.
I try to explain to Abu Ben Taxi Man, and to ask for help. All he hears are garbled sounds, convulsive breathing and screams of cockroach, cockroach, cockroach from a crazy girl spasmodically flinging a bag around the back of his cab
A couple walks by on their way home, they eyeball us for a moment without even slowing down.
“Lady, calm down, I have no bugs. You pay and then you get out. You give me six dollah and then you go away, go away and no cockroaches.” He talks to me in a soft voice, maybe a little afraid I’ll wreck his cab, stiff him or turn my hysteria on him.
I know that tone of voice. It’s the one you save for the crazy people, the one you use when you want to say “Okay, just put the gun down and back away…” Maybe he’s right and I’m crazy and this is a hallucination. Apparently. I’m the only one who sees the bugs. It happens. I know it happens, like with coke bugs. I haven’t done a that much coke in the last few days, but it could be.
I take a deep breath, in with the good, out with the bad. Okay. I’m good. Fine, just keep moving, like a shark, keep moving.
I reach into the bag to get the money. I have superior hallucinations, I think to myself, tactile as well as visual. Imaginary roaches crawl over my hand, through my fingers, up my sleeve. Calm, breathe, it’s a figment of your imagination, I tell myself. In with the good, breathe, out with the bad.
The cab speeds off down the block before I can finish closing the car door.
Standing on West 27th Street I yell up to Lola’s window, explaining that there are two distinct possibilities here. I’ve either lost my mind, which is entirely believable, or I’ve brought with me a bag full of cockroaches and maybe I shouldn’t come into the house just yet, maybe she should come take a look first.
Lola cocks her head and puts on a sad face that says she knew that eventually I would to lose my mind. Reluctantly, she comes out in her pajamas and slippers, with Chester the Dog to inspect my bag. They’re the bag inspectors.
I hold it open in front of me for them to see.
Lola leans over, peeks, yelps like a Pekinese, looks up at me and jumps back, still yelping.
She startled me and I start yelping and jumping along with her, dropping the bag. Roaches flood out of the bag and scatter everywhere. We dance and scream and jump around them, on them, yelp and jump off of them. Screaming, laughing and crying so hard I pee myself, just a little. We hold on to each other to keep from falling. Drowsy faces appear in the windows, watching two crazy girls and a dog screaming, laughing and jumping for no apparent reason. It’s still too dark for anyone else to see the bugs.
Chester the Dog, jumping along with us and licking up mouths full of live roaches acts as if I’ve brought a bag of fun treats just for him.
I’m grateful for Chester’s help, but really, she needs to feed that dog more often.
This entry was written by , posted on October 1, 2009 at 3:43 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, Chelsea, roaches, the abyss. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
